Give Your Notification Shade a Facelift with these Modding Guides

Modification has always been one of the strong suits of Android, due in large part to its nature as an open source operating system. What began as changing a few drawables back in the early days of Android, has now evolved into an entire subsection of the community, giving rise to multiple disciplines of modding, such as drawable editing, feature adding and enhancing, system theming, and much more.

In the spirit of modding and theming, XDA Recognized Themer SpaceCaker has written up two excellent guides for do-it-yourself modding. These guides provide simple and easy-to-follow instructions that walk you through the entire modding process, right up to compiling your work when you’re done, making them easy to follow for veterans and beginners alike. The first guide covers adding toggles to your notification shade, similar to the QuickSettings present on AOSP ROMs. Subsequently, the second guide deals with adding a tabbed layout to the shade, thus segregating the toggles from your notification, which likens it to the one seen on the Sony Xperia Z2. Both of these allow you to truly begin customizing your own device, rather than applying pre-built themes and modifications.

Previously I talked about the Pebble Time Kickstarter, and why I thought it was the most practical smartwatch to buy in 2015, and that I decided to be an early backer on Kickstarter. Well as of this morning an interesting development has come from my - currently - favorite smartwatch company. They will release the Pebble Time Steel variant alongside the regular Pebble, instead of say a whole release cycle down the road. The accompanying announcement along with the Steel,...

The LG G Pro Lite D680 is a budget phone that was released in 2013 alongside the LG Optimus G Pro, LG's 2013 flagship device. Unfortunately, it hasn't received much development attention so far… but XDA Recognized Developer laufersteppenwolf has now released an unsecured boot.img along with a CWM recovery. This is despite the bootloader being locked (which means there's no need for you to void your warranty!), and marks the first step towards custom ROM and kernel development for...

Samsung's latest and greatest, the Galaxy S6 Edge, is drastically different from any Samsung flagship that has come before it. The Korean giant took a very different approach when designing this little beast, creating quite the debate among android enthusiasts about whether this is really the next big thing or not. Is the Galaxy S6 Edge true innovation, or Samsung's desperate attempt to be different? Let us know what you think!

Samsung Galaxy S 4 (Sprint) [SPH-L720]

Nexus 5 (Unlocked)

Samsung Galaxy S 4 (Verizon) [SCH-I545]

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